Afterwards we strolled in the garden to the pomelo tree, stooping down to smell its blossoms, which looked like white nipples in the still darkness. We stretched out on the grass under the tree, staring up at the stars between the branches. I closed my eyes and when I opened them again I wondered for a moment where I was. I felt so utterly at one with everything around me, out of space and time, absorbed by my senses. We had left behind all our troubles and entered paradise. We remained there on the grass for what felt like an eternity, then returned to the house. The next day was the same – undisturbed by the world outside.
Before leaving Jericho, I bought Naomi and her mother flowerpots and seedlings for the garden. I remember Naomi holding them in both hands as I drove to her mother’s place. But the first thing her mother asked was, ‘Why didn’t you tell me you were going for twenty-four hours?’ I had felt her anger, her reproach, and did not stay.
On the outskirts of Ramallah, there was a prominent stop sign. As I approached, an Israeli soldier motioned with his torchlight for me to stop. It was like entering a large prison camp. The soldier asked for my identity card and I gave it to him. I thought of asking him for the latest news but stopped myself. It felt strange asking an Israeli soldier to tell me what had happened in my hometown. The soldier with the yarmulke ordered me to wait on the side of the road. Time passed slowly. After obediently waiting for an hour, I called the soldier and asked him why I could not go home. He took out a piece of paper, which he read to me. It said that a curfew had been imposed on Ramallah by order of the military commander of the West Bank.
I felt a twinge in my stomach. ‘I want to go home,’ I said. But the soldier, this foreigner, was not moved. ‘Go back to where you came from,’ he ordered. I could not return.
I did not know then that worse was yet to happen, for on 6 June 1982 Israel declared war on the PLO in Lebanon. This was to be the first of many invasions. These events seemed to mock everything I had written. The degree of violence and of evil was far worse than anything I had been trying to discuss in my ‘Samed’ pieces.
Ever an incorrigible optimist, I underestimated the level of Israel’s brutality against the Palestinians in Lebanon. Naomi knew better. She had no illusions about her own people and had not been as sure as I was that all would turn out well. She expressed surprise at my inability to see the dark side of Israel’s policy, which to her was self-evident.
Soon after the invasion of Lebanon, I visited Naomi at her home. It was a glorious, sunny day and her mother was hard at work in the garden. ‘My mother has decided to go all out this year. She’s planting sixty-five petunia seedlings. In a month the place will be awash with colour.’ Then she told me how the front garden used to be full of cyclamen at this time of year but they had all gone because some rodent had eaten the bulbs.
I observed how carefully Rosheen, with her high cheekbones and beautiful, intelligent blue eyes, carried out her task, kneeling on the bare earth, digging a hole, pouring in a little compost and placing the seedling in the hole. She was a committed gardener and seemed to be thoroughly enjoying her work. Watching her, I almost forgot the pain I felt about the war raging in Lebanon. I began to feel guilty about losing myself in the beauty of a garden in West Jerusalem when my own people were suffering in the refugee camps in Lebanon.
Three weeks after the war had started I took Naomi for a walk in the Ramallah hills. As the sun was setting, we sat on the rocks in the wadi, an enchanting view of the hills in front of us. In the distance we could hear a loudspeaker on an Israeli jeep playing Lebanese folksongs sung by Druze soldiers and mawals in Arabic. As we walked back, the sky above us was crimson and pink – it is the sun that gives colour and beauty to all things. On the way down, clusters of spindly brooms with their yellow flowers glittered and shone in the dimming light like lanterns. On the top of one of the hills, the silhouettes of olive trees assumed the shapes of animals and people. While we walked, Naomi told me what she had seen on the Israeli news about the things that were happening in Lebanon. As I listened, I became aware that I had avoided confronting the full horror that was unfolding there just as I had avoided confronting my misgivings about my friend Henry.
In the spring of that year, I went hiking in Wadi Qelt, near Jericho, for the first time. The land was blooming and after the heavy rains the waterfalls were strong and the water in the wadi ran like a river. When I reached the Monastery of St George of Koziba, in the narrowest part of the gorge, I passed an Israeli soldier and thought of a note I had received from Henry. He had been travelling abroad and had written to say we should get together on his return home. Israel as home. It gave me pause. Henry was not born in Israel. He had come of his own free will. Didn’t he need to make known his objection to what his adopted country was doing to the Palestinians? He insisted he would never join the army, but was this enough? Wasn’t he confirming by the mere act of moving here that Zionism was working and that the settlements were justified?
On another occasion, I was driving to Jerusalem, admiring the hills, their slopes cultivated with olive trees, the morning sun giving the leaves a grey-green hue. It also made me think of Henry. How could the settlers see this and think it was uninhabited? Such is the blinding power of religion. Did Henry, a constant reader of the Bible, have similarly distorted vision?
I imagined confronting Henry with this.
He would say, ‘This is an abuse of religion. It is not at all how I see Judaism. I’m against Jewish settlements in the Occupied Territories and support the call for a Palestinian state. It is true that I am here as a Jew, but not as a colonialist, and I will never tolerate the wrong done to Palestinians. I am your friend and want us to live together as brothers. Don’t you see the difference? The existence of a Jewish home is important to me, but I don’t want it to oppress Palestinians and deny them their human rights. I want us to live together.’
And I would reply, ‘But your very presence here is because you’re a Jew. This fact alone gives you more rights to this country than I have. The Jewish presence in this land has turned out to be not just cultural, as you had hoped. It is a colonising presence. Can you not see this?’
It is what one brings to a place that determines one’s experience of it, not just what is there. Henry brought with him his mother’s yearning to settle in Israel. She was a Zionist, but she did have serious misgivings about Israel and, unlike her sister, she had delayed bringing her family over. Henry’s mother had expressed her objections to him about how the Israeli government was behaving, but he wanted to make it a better place to live – not through political action but through human interaction. Henry had thought he would be involved in politics, but he realised that it would get him into trouble so he stayed away.
When Henry read the manuscript of my book of essays, he liked it. He shared my belief in sumoud. He told me that in the Treblinka concentration camp the inmates would say, ‘Faced with two alternatives, always choose the third.’ I appreciated the aphorism, expanded it and used it for the back cover of the book, adding, ‘Between mute submission and blind hate, I choose the third way. I am Samed.’ This was how the book found its title, The Third Way. I was gaining more clarity about my attitude to what was taking place around me and how to represent it, but I was failing to find a way to express these apprehensions that I felt about Henry.
Every day, I received reports of the terrible things being done to the Palestinians by Begin’s government, but Henry reassured me that Begin was not representative of all Israelis. Jews have a morality that will ultimately deter them, he assured me. I thought about this as I once again stood in an office, delayed, humiliated, asking the military for some permit or other. What use was this morality when its existence meant my daily suffering? Had Henry spoken out against any of this?
Henry gave me many things I was looking for in a friendship. We spoke of books. We talked about ourselves. We enjoyed walking. I liked his sense of humour. I told myself that there was no reason why he should be an activist. Did
everyone here have to be an activist? So many self-proclaimed activists did not interest me. I liked Henry for who he was and this was enough. It was wrong to expect Henry to be political when it wasn’t in his nature to be so.
I was returning from a visit to my sisters in Amman when I met Henry’s friend Eldad at the Allenby Bridge. With his frog-like eyes and drooping face, he was easy to recognise. When we’d first met – at dinner at the house of Henry’s girlfriend, Iva – he had seemed perfectly agreeable and pleasant, but this time he was wearing an army uniform. His reserve duty consisted of searching Palestinian passengers crossing the bridge between Jordan and Israel. We were no longer fellow guests at a dinner party; we were now a civilian from an occupied population and a soldier in the occupying army.
Eldad proceeded to exercise the full authority afforded by his status and his uniform. The search was humiliating and, throughout it all, he didn’t even pretend not to know me. He talked about the dinner party, how he had enjoyed meeting me there and then ordered me to take off my belt and shoes, lower my trousers, spread my legs and turn around. He ordered me to empty my bag. Any questionable items he threw in a basket to be confiscated, including the presents I had brought back for my mother, a tin of Tiger Balm and several cakes of perfumed soap. He made no apologies. I remained silent. He could tell I was angry.
‘I have to follow the rules,’ he said.
When I told Henry of this encounter he did not seem unduly perturbed. It made me wonder whether, when the time came, he also would be willing to follow orders.
While the war continued in Lebanon, I travelled to London and Oxford on Al-Haq business to meet Amnesty International and Oxfam. Afterwards I took time off to walk in the Lake District. From there I wrote Henry a letter:
Dear Henry,
Harsh words, but I feel I must say them. I strongly believe anyone, whether a citizen or living here as you do and participating in the life of the state and its ‘development’, is a victim of the evil just as I am. However, inasmuch as you have made your choice to come to Israel and settle, by your silence you are acquiescing and participating in its evil. I can never respect you for that, nor forgive you. The absence of your voice against what is taking place in Lebanon with the Israeli army has cut me deeply. I mistrusted my attitude and thought that travelling abroad would make me change it. But being away only confirmed my stance.
All this has made me realise how totally devastating it is for a friendship when one loses one’s respect for his friend, as I have. It did not have to be so. Ours was a strong tie, with strong beliefs and expectations. The disappointment is equally strong.
I thought of you every time I stopped – especially when sitting on the hill by Lake Windermere in England – but my feelings persisted and persist now. I find it difficult to change my expectations, to redefine my relationship and understanding of you.
I am as sorry for you as I am for myself. Our only common denominator is that we are both victims of evil. The sooner you admit this the healthier it would be for you. I sincerely wish it for both our sakes.
Several nights ago, I dreamed that you came over. You had shaved your beard. It was difficult to recognise you. You had to introduce yourself to me. Yours was a boyish face but a tired, less handsome one than your own, also thinner.
I found myself having to make your acquaintance anew. Around your neck you wore a medallion of a royal-blue colour. That was your only distinction. I remember thinking you wore it to replace the gap left by the shaved beard. Then you walked away. I called you, but you were running away with a smile on your face.
I only thought I owe it to you, to our friendship, to let you know how deeply disappointed I feel. At the end of the day I did not know now whether to be happy, relieved or regretful at the loss of your beard.
Henry’s response saddened me. He tried to reaffirm our friendship outside politics and refused to respond to my challenge on ‘such a political level’. Instead he tried to explain how important it was for him to come to Israel, the place where his late mother had dreamed of coming. He was living her dream and in this way keeping her alive. He wanted this to be an individual act without any political significance.
On 7 July 1982 he again wrote to me:
Raja,
Today one of my patients, a woman I have been seeing for a year, told me that if things don’t change in the next six months or so she will commit suicide. What do you say to a person in despair – that nevertheless there is meaning?
But as Henry, as Enoch the Jew, I do feel that I am murdering your people here daily with frightening efficiency, and will I, can I, live up to those expectations of which you write so beautifully? For I think you are right. I have failed you – my demonstrations, proclamations, against the occupation don’t help you or your people a damn.
Still, Raja my friend, my Palestinian, I do love you and cherish this thing which has grown between us. I feel I should respond to you and your tale. But I am unable now to do it on such a political level. I will send you a fantasy which started from a dream so that even at some level we can remain in dialogue. Or perhaps, as your dream suggests, shave my beard …
And finally, although you will get a formal invitation, I do want to add that Iva and I will be married on 12 August at 5 p.m. at Rehov Hakevet 53 (along railway tracks) and I hope you will come. Fiddler on the Roof, which I recall you like, has a line: Life has so much suffering, a wedding gives us an excuse if only for a little while to rejoice.
Yours,
Enoch
What worried me was his designation in a letter, signed using his biblical name, of me as ‘my Palestinian’. Could I be, as I had sometimes suspected, a token Palestinian friend? The mere suspicion that this might be the case troubled me. Our friendship was more profound and closer than that. And yet this reference led me to worry and suspect. I would never have called him ‘my Jew’ or ‘my Israeli’. To me Henry was too much of an individual for that.
A few days later Henry visited me. He brought with him the formal invitation to his wedding to Iva. It was the first meeting between us in many months. He told me he was trying to make his wedding a happy event where all would feel welcome, communal and close. Call it childish, call it selfish, call it indulgence, he said, but life must go on. ‘We must find time to marry, time to be merry, even during periods of great disaster and horror. As is the case now,’ he told me.
After he left I realised that this was Henry the dreamer, the anthropologist, the carefree man, the modern Jew. He was no moralist, not someone who claimed the moral high ground. Nor was he one who could assume responsibility or feel responsible for what was being done in the name of his religion. He had his own very special conception of what being Jewish was. I could not expect more of him and perhaps it was unfair that I did.
I attended Henry and Iva’s wedding despite the war in the north and its venue in an old Palestinian home. It turned out to be a joyful event, everything that Henry had hoped it would be, and it brought together a diverse community of friends.
That summer Naomi went back to Oxford to pursue her studies. On 16 September her worst fears about Sharon materialised in the form of massacres at two Palestinian refugee camps, Sabra and Shatila, in Beirut. Over the course of two days thousands of mostly Palestinians and Shiite Lebanese were killed when Israeli troops under Sharon’s leadership allowed their Phalangist allies to enter the camps under the light of Israeli flares.
A week later I received a postcard from Henry:
Only now hearing about the Lebanese massacres. There is nothing to say. I bow my head in shame and pray for the consolation of prayer.
Your friend,
Henry
5
The Sea
Akka, 1971
When the occupation began in 1967 the whole of what had been Mandatory Palestine was opened to us for the first time since the establishment of Israel nineteen years earlier. The Israeli military government declared the West Bank a closed military zone and
issued a general permit that allowed the Palestinians to cross into Israel. Prior to this we in the West Bank had had no access to the sea, but now the Mediterranean became a mere hour’s drive away from Ramallah. It was so close we couldn’t get enough of it. We began driving there every week in summer. Akka (Acre), Jaffa, Haifa – I liked to repeat the names of the coastal cities, and I could hardly believe they were now within easy reach. The sea was ours again and the land acquired a new integrity, a completeness that I had not felt previously.
It isn’t that we didn’t go to the sea before that. We used to make the arduous journey every summer to the Mediterranean but further north, on the shores of Lebanon. It would take more than eight hours by car – from Jordan through Syria and then to Lebanon – to reach our destination. At each border, we never knew whether we would be allowed to cross.
Every Sunday during the summer in the first few years of occupation we would leave Ramallah early in the morning. We drove through Betunia, took the Latrun road and crossed the central hills to the coastal plain. My father’s driving often made us queasy. He would take corners fast and brake all too suddenly. We could hardly wait to get to the straight roads on the plain. Once there, we enjoyed being close to the sea, feeling the sea air blowing through the open windows of the white Mercedes in which all six of us were crammed.
At first we used to go to the beaches closer to Ramallah, such as Bat Yam, south of Jaffa, which could be reached in around forty-five minutes. At Bat Yam there was usually a group of older retired men, Arabs and Jews, veterans of the sea. The Arabs who remained in Palestine after 1948 had thick, tanned salamander skin. Wearing only black trunks and unselfconscious about their nakedness, they sat on low stools playing backgammon, or shish besh, thumping the pieces down on the board. I wanted to be like them and wondered whether I would have been if my father had stayed in Jaffa and we’d lived close to the sea. How much time would I have needed to spend at the beach to get that kind of skin?
Where the Line is Drawn Page 6
